I Win
“I called House. Maybe she’ll come over when she gets out of work,” Stephanie said. I was sitting at the computer, tired from a long day of renovating the Bodega. This was yesterday.
“Good,” I said, “I was wondering how I was going to stay up later than seven-thirty tonight.” My dog died last week.
House showed up at around nine. Her first name is Stephanie, too, so we always call her by her last name. We chatted for a while about Roanoke, which she had just visited. Roanoke is on the west side of Virginia and has a population of around 100,000, according to a census bureau web site. Stephanie and I argue a lot and make bets about who was in Single White Female, so we got the internet. It was Bridget Fonda and not Patricia Arquette; in this case, I was wrong.
“So, then, do you not want to play cards,” Stephanie asked us. Neither House nor I had a problem with Rummy 500, so I dealt the first hand.
I’m not sure we play Rummy by the right rules, but normally we don’t have any problems. I usually lose, but one time I beat Stephanie in a best-of three tournament and she had to draw me a four page comic book. It happened to be about a horse and a chipmunk confessing to each other.
On this night, House beat Stephanie by only five points. I’ve got the scorecard right here.
The game lasted ten rounds, and that’s fairly long for Rummy 500; it means that the winner only scored an average of 50 points each round. The first player to earn 500 points is the champion, and you score by putting down at least three cards of the same number, or a run of the same suit, for instance a nine, ten, and Jack of hearts. That particular combination would give you 25 points, because tens and face cards are worth ten, the way we play, and everything lower is worth five. Aces are fifteen.
I dealt five cards and House won the first round quickly, with 65 points. When she played the last set in her hand, Stephanie and I had to give her our remaining cards. I hated to lose a King.
“Does anyone need another beer?” Stephanie asked. The night was young. I did.
I was thinking about my dog, and how if she were alive she’d be sitting next to my chair, looking at me. Last week she was doing that but her lungs or something were filled with blood. I found all sorts of rat poison in the bodega downstairs, and Thunder was part Rat Terrier. How funny!
But that couldn’t have been it -- you should see how hearty the mice minions are.
In the fourth round, Stephanie played a Jack, Queen, and King of diamonds. On my turn I drew the Ace of diamonds but didn’t play it in Stephanie’s straight because I already had the Ace of spades. I took a risk, hoping I could finagle another Ace and play the three together. That way I would make 45 points instead of just fifteen for finishing the straight.
I discarded and said, “D.G.O.” which stands for “Don’t Go Out.” Stephanie made that up weeks ago when she secretly didn’t want me to play my final card and win. In our games, saying “D.G.O.” instead of the unabbreviated version passes for a poker face.
It struck me that the letters, rearranged, spell “dog.”
Then Stephanie went out.
But it was under controversial circumstances. She had used a wild card (Jokers are wild) to represent the Queen of diamonds, so she thought it’d be fair to switch it a turn later when she actually drew that card. She inserted the real Queen and made the wild into the Ace. I jumped on that right away. I thought I had a chance.
“It doesn’t make any sense!” I said. “Nihilist!” I said, but House noted that in an earlier round she had played a real card over a wild card in Stephanie’s pile. I asked if doing that required shifting runs around but the clarification was lost in the greater argument. House rules.
Stephanie compromised by winning but not taking points for the wild card. It cost her the game, she said, but that’s a “counterfactual.” There’s no way to know what would have happened if the US hadn’t bombed Hiroshima or if Stephanie hadn’t cheated.
My brother taught me that word, “counterfactual” on Saturday. I was telling him about the White Sox game when the umpire called a passed ball and the batter took first; the score was tied and the Angels could have lost either way. Heisenberg said it years ago -- just looking at something changes it.
We looked at each other wrong and my mood was spoiled. I nursed another beer but it didn’t help. Stephanie nursed three or four. House looked on, drinking normally and winning another round. I knew I was being unpleasant, knew that humans have the power to change their attitudes and that I really had no reason to be glum, but what the heck. So I’m hopeless.
Then I scored ninety points on the next round and felt happier. I didn’t want to show it, though, thinking that to be in a good mood suddenly might seem disingenuous. And besides, we had moved from listening to XKS Gets Tight onto Triple XKS, an album I don’t like as much. Stephanie declared that we would listen to it over and over.
One day we listened to London Calling several dozen times, morning to night. I love “Lost in the Supermarket” for its simple truth. Long distance callers do make long distance calls, actually.
XKS is Stephanie’s old band. With her friends Xav and Kiki, they formed in Milwaukee in 2001. They’d sit around and drink coffee, then write and record albums real fast, with explicitly sexual songs (Triple XKS), and horror-type songs (Super Scary). They had an album called Psychics and their newest one is XKS Gets Tight. I love the idea of XKS, they were so weird, but their last album is the only essential one. The song “Somnambulist” describes their roles. Xav sings, “K on the Quest Black Magic coming through the Peavey/S is on the Korg keys also through a Peavey/And me, X, I’m on a Technica and we’re all coming out of a Sony, Panasonic, GE.” That’s just some gearhead talk.
House has a boyfriend who plans to move to Baltimore and live with her. He lives in Memphis but decided out of nowhere to quit his job, sell his car, and head east. We discussed that as the game progressed. I had two sevens, a nine, a King, and a three. I drew a six and discarded it.
I only moved to this city in August. Stephanie, heartsick, left Milwaukee and bought her bodega in East Baltimore. A couple weeks before she moved we started to do things together. It was a hot summer and we kept going to the beach. We were beach bums, and Stephanie led us in Sun Salutations a lot. Yoga hurts my back.
I called her from Milwaukee on the day she first unlocked her new door. I was having a hard time picturing the boarded-up bay window she described, so I said “hold on” and flew out the next day. It was emotional. Back in Wisconsin I quit my job and sold my car and Thunder and I headed east. Stephanie said it’s a nice story and asked House if her beau had any reason to move here aside from her. No, he didn’t. That’s a lot of pressure for her. Him too. I had a number of reasons to move and felt that no matter how things between Stephanie and I played out, it was a win-win situation.
I can’t remember how the rest of the round went. In fact, it wasn’t honest to note the cards I was holding or what I drew. I just invented those details to keep the story focused. In fact, I hardly paid attention during the game, because winning Rummy 500 isn’t that important to me. One time I lost and had to buy Stephanie cheesecake, fresh strawberries, brandy, $6 orange juice, and fancy coffee for breakfast.
And if our relationship wasn’t a winner, I planned to move in with my brother, who is a teacher living in Westminster. He knows about politics and is interesting to talk to. I called him a few minutes ago to ask what that word was, the one he taught me on Saturday.
“Hang on a second,” he said, “it’s on the tip of my tongue.”
“Uncountable or something,” I prompted.
“No, ‘counterfactuals’.” He also taught me about the economic concept of a “sunk cost,” so I knew it didn’t matter that there was a girl I liked in Milwaukee. I wanted Stephanie more.
It’s interesting to not that I met the other girl I liked through Stephanie. She was the third person doing Sun Salutations. Also, there was another crush a few weeks before that, also a setup of Stephanie’s. She was a journalist who came to a party after the opening of a play I wrote. We had a great weekend but she dropped me on Monday.
I recounted all of this to House while we talked about her situation. I noted that her friend must be nervous about the step he was taking. I certainly was. I was a neurotic mess during the two weeks between my visit to Baltimore and the day I moved here. I spent every night at the Polish Falcon watching Brewers’ games with Dimitri, my friend who said that if Stephanie called and told me not to come, he would pay me $100. See how quickly he turned even that into a winning situation? And the Brewers were dabbling with a .500 record.
“I was just hoping I could get out here,” I told House. “I just didn’t want Stephanie to freak out and tell me not to come.”
“I was hoping that you wouldn’t freak out and change your mind,” Stephanie said. It was nice to hear. I had known and admired her for several years, since I saw her perform “Maid Sailor” as Ms. Money Money. She was stunning. We talked a few times but I think it wasn’t until she helped me out at a rehearsal for my play that she really noticed me. At that time there was some disagreement between a couple actors so I said to them, “Okay, but can you say it nicely?” Apparently, that struck Stephanie as very likable.
I don’t think I mentioned all that to House while we played Rummy 500. The point I made to her was that I had a contingency plan if things didn’t work out. I learned about contingency plans from my brother long ago. I learned about being impetuous from my father, who called me that when I moved out to Milwaukee. Originally, I’m from upstate New York.
“That was another factor in moving here,” Stephanie said. “He’d been wanting to move back East for a while.”
“Yeah, it worked out perfectly,” I agreed, discarding the three (maybe). All of the talk about my love life cheered me a little. I crave attention.
Maybe that’s how come I’m a writer, for the attention. Once I had a short story contest with my friend from Chicago, but it was different. In this case, the story was the prize. I bet him that the Brewers would finish the season with a better record than the Cubs, and the loser had to write a short story for the winner. I keep checking my mail but it hasn’t come yet. When I asked him about it, he said that some people owe him some stories and once he gets them he’ll be able to send mine. Get it? I win.
Last night, though, House came over and we played Rummy 500, and I lost by a wide margin. Stephanie only lost by five points. That’s just what happened -- it’s not the moral of the story. The moral isn’t that House always wins, it’s that, sometimes, I win.